Spaniards eat lunch from 1:30pm to 5:30pm, and dinner from 8pm to midnight. Restaurants therefore open only during those hours. For us, it’s been difficult to adjust. We’re famished by noon. By the time we’re ready for lunch, the restaurants that are open had just wound down from their second breakfast. Dinner at 8pm is just too late for us (we’re habitually in bed by 9pm back home). As a result, we haven’t had a chance to eat a proper dinner in Spain since arriving. It’s usually just a large lunch for the entire day, and a snack in the early evening. So why do Spaniards eat at such late times? It has to do with their time zone. Spain should be in GMT (London) time, but instead, it is aligned with CET (Berlin) time. This means sunrise in the past few days has been around 8:40am (almost 2 hours behind California’s sunrises). Spain apparently has been in the wrong time zone since WWII, when Francisco Franco changed the country’s time zone to be in solidarity with Nazi Germany. The country never bothered to turn it back after the war. As a result, the Spaniards’ days start and end later.
However, we finally managed to stay up for dinner today in Córdoba.
FIRE'd @ 47 